By merely framing a patch of the world, a photograph invites us to see what is easily passed over. Such is the modest notion proposed by “Hidden in Plain Sight,” a tightly organized exhibition of about 35 images from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, which opened Tuesday and remains on view all summer.

Although it explores the poetics of the ordinary, the show has the notable virtue of not ranging too far afield. Rather than corralling as many pertinent images by as many photographers as possible, it lingers at times on the work of a single artist, allowing the visitor a fuller taste of his sensibility.

The first room, for instance, is devoted to Gabriel Orozco, who aims at a revitalization of our interactions with the visual world through photography. “What is important,” he says in the wall text, “is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again.” Usually Mr. Orozco doesn’t seek to gussy up reality: His is a straightforward, documentary aesthetic that discerns minor notes of beauty in the flux of things. Sometimes he trains that documentary eye on his own sculptural interventions.

“Dog Circle” (1995) focuses on the swept semicircle a dog’s tail makes as it wags over sand on concrete, while “Vitral” (1998) relishes the color and shapes of kites caught in a bare tree against a dark blue sky. Some prints record the photographer’s intrusions in the world, how he shapes things to his eye. “Sand on Table” (1995) documents one of his ephemeral sculptures, a pyramid of sand set on a table standing in sand. Usually, however, the found sculptures nature affords make for better photographs than those documenting the artist’s own constructions.

Walker Evans was the master photographer of found objects and inadvertent artworks. In 1973, he began experimenting with the then new Polaroid technology, saying approvingly that it “reduces everything to your brain and taste.” A number of Evans’s small, instant reductions are grouped together in the show: a third of a blueberry pie seen from above, its filling oozing beyond the crust; a cluster of sponges propped in a glass pitcher imitate flowers in a vase; the accidental still life of a spatula, serving spoons, and a hand mixer stuck on a pegboard kitchen wall.

It is instructive to compare Evans’s image of newspapers for sale on a rack to Jean-Marc Bustamante’s treatment of the same subject. Coolly formal, static without being inert, the Evans image draws its power from how casual the presentation seems. By contrast, drama — or melodrama — suffuses Mr. Bustamante’s untitled photograph from 1998. Wind lifts the corners of the papers, and the field of view is wider, so that one is struck by the contrast of the monochrome papers and the colored spines of magazines for sale nearby as well as by the strong shadows that define the space.

If Mr. Bustamante, who never names his settings, searches for the emotional peaks wherever he shoots, William Eggleston is concerned more with how space is transformed into place by particular details. One typically lush nighttime picture, from the series “Troubled Waters” (1980), couples a neon Confederate flag sign, bent to look like it’s fluttering in the wind, with a palm tree. Another from the same series peers into a frost-heavy freezer with its circular ice cream cartons and rectangular frozen-food packages. The picturelike shape of the icebox reminds us that it is the camera’s framing that makes the humble elements within poignant.

Indeed, the frame-within-aframe becomes a major theme here, one uniting the efforts of disparate photographers. The open window of a green truck door frames a horse-and-rider statue and, like a cropped photo, a man’s back and head in Raghubir Singh’s “Suhas Chandra Bose Statue, Five Point Crossing” (1987), much as the legs and top of Miles Coolidge’s three-legged “Table” (2006) frame lines in the sidewalk on which it leans. Damián Ortega’s “Jarnineras (Planters)” (1992), six individually framed images of rectangular brick planters discovered on Mexico City streets, nods to Minimalist painting. But allusions aside, it also asks us to attend to the easily overlooked beauty of the planters in their various states of decay.

Stephen Shore’s “U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon” (1973) makes ironic use of the motif. A billboard painted with an idealized view of a lake before a snowcapped mountain stands in a gorgeous landscape of mountains and prairie. White streaks of real clouds seem to hover over the painted mountain. Sometimes, Mr. Shore’s image suggests, we need a picture to see what’s actually there.

Until September 3 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).